Set that alongside another report of a survey conducted by the NSPCC and Bristol University and a picture begins to grow. Of the 1,353 teenage girls and boys questioned across the UK, nearly 90% of girls aged 13 to 17 – and a similar number of boys – had been in an intimate relationship. But consider the following observations as summarised by the Guardian:

25% of girls had suffered physical violence, including being slapped, punched or beaten by their boyfriends.

Of 91 young people questioned at length, one in six of the girls said that they had been pressured into having sex and one in 16 claimed to have been raped. Others who took part in the study said that they had been pressured or forced to kiss or intimately touch their boyfriends.

A small minority of the boys – one in 17 – reported being pressured or forced into sexual activity and almost one in five suffered physical violence in a relationship.

Many of the girls said they felt they had to put up with the abuse because they felt scared or guilty, or feared they would lose their boyfriend.

The NSPCC said that having an older boyfriend placed young girls at a higher risk of abuse, with three-quarters of them saying they had been victims.

Young women from a family where an adult had been violent towards them were also at greater risk.

For boys, having a violent group of friends actually made it more likely that they would become a victim, or be a perpetrator of violence, in a relationship.

Apparently, the report concludes that schools need to raise awareness of relationships where there is harmful, controlling and abusive behaviour. The Guardian report ends with the following:

Diane Sutton, head of policy and public affairs at the NSPCC, said: “It is shocking to find so many young people view violence or abuse in relationships as normal. Boys and girls are under immense peer pressure to behave in certain ways and this can lead to disrespectful and violent relationships, with girls often bearing the brunt. Young people need to learn to respect each other.” She added that parents and schools could perform a vital role in teaching children about loving and safe relationships and what to do if they are suffering from violence or abuse.

Not suprisingly, these rather disturbing findings got plenty of air-play today and I picked up on an interview on BBC Radio 5Live in which a policeman was describing the teenage behaviour he regularly meets on the streets. He stated that it would take generations to change behaviour and the attitudes that lead young people to behave in such ways that betray low self-esteem and immaturity in relationships. He was followed by a woman claiming that if teenage lads were cuddled and hugged more, they wouldn’t need to demand such affection from girls – which she clearly saw as a form of inappropriate transference.

I thought this was quite interesting. Not only do we live in a highly sexualised society in which we have young girls saying on television that their goal in life is ‘to be like Jordan‘ (Katie Price, the glamour model best known for her dysfunctional relationships and pneumatic breasts) – ‘famous’ – but we also grow our children to be suspicious of all adults, to fear for their safety and to avoid touch. Now, this might be delicate and contentious, but let’s speculate about a couple of the possible contributors to this state of affairs:

1. I have vivid memories of being upset at primary school and being hugged by a teacher and sat on the lap of another teacher while she read a story to the class. I was six years old and I was grateful. That could not happen today. I recently heard a teacher describe on the radio the problems of being in a classroom with (possibly) one other classroom assistant when a child has an accident or needs to go to the loo. How can they cope when the child has to be accompanied by two adults and there is no one left to look after the class? Why be accompanied by two adults? Because we have now decided that no adult can be trusted with a child alone and that legal protection demands suspicion.

And what does this sort of arrangement – brought in for very good reasons in the wake of serious child abuse cases – do to the way our growing children view the world, adults, normality and relationships? All adults are to be fundamentally suspected of being deviant? Nobody can be trusted – or nobody should be trusted? And is this sort of arrangement really for the protection of children from sexual harm, or is it simply to provide the employers from legal redress or suspicion in the light of any allegations of such abuse? The distinction matters.

2. Does the lack of touch offered to children create a later unconscious craving for touch/affection that is then satisfied by ‘intimate’ relationships that are both immature and premature? Rowan Williams touched on this in his powerful critique of our society’s view of children in Lost Icons and I picked it up in my own book Finding Faith. Is the woman on the radio right to surmise that children/teenagers are increasingly seeking intimacy because they lack affection at home, never get touched appropriately by other human beings and are only given sexualised models of relating by our dominant culture? And is this particularly the case for boys who have no idea how to become men because there are no respect-worthy role models in their home?

This is sensitive stuff. But I worry that a society shaped by an antipathy to potential abuse does not necessarily create a healthy positive view of relationships. Maybe this is yet another example of the law of unintended consequences. It might be that we have no alternative but to protect the few by condemning the many. But, I wonder if there really are links between the findings of the OECD report, the conclusions of the NSPCC report and the observations of our own eyes as we wonder how this can be turned round in future generations.

Perhaps we need a wider public debate about this. In the meantime, … answers on a postcard?

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17 Responses to “Don’t touch!”

Crikey, this is food for thought! As a mother of two daughters who is *dreading* their teenage years, this is really something very very interesting to roll around in my head.

Along these lines… I had a little moment of crisis when I first went off to university — I went into a serious blue funk and couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Then one day, it hit me: I came from a very very affectionate family — lots of kisses, lots of hugs, lots of love — and when I moved away to uni, all that just STOPPED. And I really felt it — found the sudden change quite difficult to adjust to. So, upon figuring this out, I asked my roommate if she’d mind giving me a kiss goodnight (just a peck on the cheek) when I went off to bed. She was fine with that, and it actually really changed things for me — the blue funk lifted and I felt ok again. I just needed that small daily dose of affection.
Months later, I got a boyfriend, and my roommate’s goodnight kisses became less necessary(!), but at least I was aware of my own cravings for affection as I made my relationship decisions. If I hadn’t been so aware (I’ve always been ridiculously self-analytical — pity my husband), I might have made poorer choices, driven by needs I didn’t understand.

As a music teacher I’ve thought about this a great deal; some of what I teach is much, much easier to get across if I can touch my students and they can touch me, yet I proceed extremely cautiously (even when I am teaching in the student’s home and their parents are around), both because I don’t want to make the students uncomfortable and I don’t want to make trouble for myself. I teach students from a variety of cultures with different boundaries about touch from family to family and I find the best way to be sure is to ask the student directly, things like “Are you comfortable with resting your hand on top of mine while I play that passage, so you feel the way my arm moves?” and, on the occasions when they are upset and getting a parent involved seems inappropriate, “Would you like a hug?” tend to be answered.

I’ve not always been very happy about being hugged myself. I now have a group of friends with whom I share some physical contact without sexual relationship or implications. I don’t know how much of this is because I don’t have family in this country, but there have been times I’ve been upset or scared and a hug or a gentle squeeze of the hand has been very comforting, and I’m very grateful for the contact. Many of us have shaky mental health and someone who may be comfortable with a hug one day might not be able to handle it the next… and I find the same thing happening. I tend to greet most of these friends with a hug, but I ask them first. And they tend to ask me, too. It doesn’t take long and the hugs don’t seem any less genuine for it.

A key to this sort of consent is that if a student or friend says “No, I’d rather not,” in response to a question about touch, I take it seriously, don’t try to convince them my way is better, don’t ask them to justify their feelings. I just move on and teach or converse another way.

That sort of culture of consent did not really exist in my family of origin. Surely something that made me uncomfortable with casual physical contact for quite some time was that my experience of touch had been often negative and sometimes violent. But I think a large part of it had to do with not having been taught to value my own emotions and opinions, not having been taught that it is okay to disagree, not having been taught that my instincts about my body are valid. “I don’t want to” was never taken as a good reason to be let alone.

I don’t know how to balance the need to influence children’s behaviour with the need to respect their personhood. My teaching is very much built around teaching the student something which they want to learn and which I love; at the end of the day if I fail to inspire them it is better for them to quit than for me to resort to coercion. This is clearly not always the case with parenting, and yet I wonder whether treating children with more respect is one key to them trusting adults better.

Another, as you’ve pointed out before, might be for adults to treat one another better.

Song, I don’t know how it is possible to teach music without touch. I was a trumpeter in my teenage years – once my voice had begun to break. The teacher had to hold my stomach and throat in order for me to learn how to breathe properly. Now that wouldn’t happen, I guess, because of the potential suspicion of some other motive or fear of an allegation of ‘assault’.

Your comment about ‘personhood’ is apposite. I remember going into an Oasis Academy last year and seeing a sign on the wall that said: ‘We don’t believe every child matters. We believe every person matters.’ That seemed to me to get it absolutely right – especially in relation to children’s responsibilities towards adults.

Strawberry, did you ever ask your ex-roommate what she thought about this? It would be interesting to know.

I have one daughter (now 25 and married) and she was ‘interesting’ in her teenage years. Girls are far more melodramatic and emotionally ‘swingy’ than boys, it seems to me. The lads would fight at school, but, as long as one of them had a football next day, they just got on with it. With my daughter, we never knew from one day to the next what emotional state she’d be in, who was now no longer friends with whom, who had said what to whom about what… It was exhausting.

An interesting parallel track about whether we are over-defensive wrt child protection questions: a revealing American Apparel advert has been banned by the ASA because the 23 year old model “looks” (to the ASA) to be under 16.

I picked up the debate at Letters from a Tory (who defends the “non state” ASA model).

I find Song’s response really interesting. I took ballet for years as a kid, and that’s another thing I can’t imagine being taught without touch. In fact, not touch so much as having your limbs grabbed and yanked into the right position (“Not like that, like THIS!”). My mother was a professional dancer, and it was the same for her — the student’s body as a mere instrument, not as a thing of autonomy.

Years later, when I started weight lifting, one of the gym owners was trying to show me how to do a certain movement correctly. He said, “Do you mind if touch your shoulder blade with my hand?” and I was really taken aback. I had spent so many years being man-handled into the right shapes that it seemed really odd to be *asked*, and so carefully. I honestly hadn’t realised how much the politics of touch had changed until that moment.

Nick, I asked my roommate if she minded the goodnight kisses at the point I instigated them, and she didn’t at all. We’d become firm friends by then, almost sister-like, so it actually felt quite natural. I never asked her how she felt when things changed (ie, the boyfriend) and I no longer needed her as my source of affection. But years later, she came out to me as a lesbian (I had no clue, but the boyfriend claimed he’d “always known”…!) and I must have had a momentary look of panic when she said it, because she immediately laughed and said, “Don’t worry — YOU didn’t turn me!” So, perhaps if I had asked her how she felt about those kisses, I might have got more of an answer than I was ready for. 😉 😀

This is not totally relevant to your blog topic but it’s something I’ve wanted to say for years! As a child, whenever we visited elderly relatives I was always expected to kiss them on arriving and leaving. I hated that – and to this day I find middle class expectations of everyone kissing hello and goodbye in social situations really difficult!
Anne.

I can echo some of your thoughts, especially my own embarassment as a boy when singled out for the type of attention, such as being hugged, kissed, or even to sing the Song Danny Boy as a party piece (my second name is Danny).

I put this down to spending 6 years in care, without the benefit of parents being there to hug or kiss me, being split off from my two sisters for several years.

Being in care, breeds a child with a different outlook – perhaps a little insular and selfish, linked with bravado, to ward off bullying. Being one of the gang on equal terms was terrifyingly important.

When I returned home, it was without a mother and with a disfunctional father, who had to work all hours to keep 3 children on a minimum wage – we did not have time for luxuries like love or personal feelings, we were to busy surviving.

I joined the Army as soon as I was able, 17 years old, and found another institution to replace the one I grew up with.

The one determinent in my life was self and while nominally a Christian, that was low on my priority list. I took a lot of years and growing to realise that my up bringing was responsible for a lot of my attitudes, culture and behaviour.

The Army was my life, but provided a framework for experience, growth and development and life skills, which I lacked when I joined.

Now, 43 years later, with two adult, reasonably well adjusted children and 5 grandchildren, who display a lot of the evidence of the current cultural bias of younger people today – peer pressure and all. Luckily the oldest has joined the ACF with the next waiting to join.

The ACF is not a recruiting centre for the Army, rather a youth organisation, which aspires to provide a framework of skills and activities, which help young people grow and develop, outside the prevalent culture of drink, drugs and behaviour which goes with it.

There is not enough provision for young people, and perhaps the Church is one organisation which could reach out more in this respect.

Any worthwhile youth organisation must speak their language, know their issues and be able to address them. It must posses the resources and skills to provide actitivies which they will want to join – the question is whether Society (or the Church) is ready to pick up the challenge and provide them.

What really interesting waters we are getting into! I really have enjoyed the honesty in these comments – and thank you Nick for broaching it. I haven’t read much of the original report (except the bits the BBC aired) but what resonated to me, as a head of a primary school, is how important it has been to create a thoroughly safe culture where touch is allowed, respected and seen as part of how we communicate – both between adults, between children and when children require it from adults.

All of these comments about the value of touch in our lives speak volumes about the deep resonance we long for in our relationships. This is why for many young people today, it appears that gentle touch can be more intimate (i.e. conveying more and deeper affection) than sex does. This is our topsy-turvy world. Keep the comments coming – they are fascinating!

[…] Bishop Nick Baines is looking at a different aspect of this – what damage is done by effectively outlawing informal touch between teachers and children at school, and is an aggressive sexual culture in our teens, 20s and 30s one of the consequences? […]

It’s very special to be able to give your nearly-18 year old son a big hug when he needs some comfort – but I had to wait till he came to me at midnight when I was half asleep. The joys and sacrifices of parenthood! I think it’s just as important for children to see their parents demonstrating affection and hugging. That is one of the observations in the report ‘A Good Childhood’.

I’m reminded of a Greenbelt seminar from the mid-1980s touching on loss of non-sexual intimacy.

I think that key factors are also fear and loss of trust in “the other” – I’d cite the “all men are potential rapists” and the current massive emphasis on “stranger danger” as parts of the problem.

Two impacts for me personally are that I stopped either giving lifts to hitchhikers or helping people with broken down cars many years ago, and now I would think more than twice before before helping a potentially lost child.

[…] Williams’ critique of ‘childhood’ in (for just one example) Lost Icons and (b) The Good Childhood Report by the Children’s Society in 2009. How might they be used to shape policy and all that goes […]